The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher

by Hortense Calisher

  Mira dropped her skirt down.

  “Do,” said Miss Hulme, rallying, although her hat retained its outrage. She paused to right it, to make amends. “A little Purcell, perhaps. I do so love the old madrigals. Or a ballad?”

  Mira swung her head suspiciously to one side. She thinks she is being chivied, thought Jane. Or like an animal that must be persuaded it has not behaved badly.

  Mrs. Wigham moved the door in invitation. Through it Jane saw the room beyond, recognizing the tone of the afternoon that might have been had she and Mrs. Wigham been alone. Tables confused under books, worn couches blotted with pillows and stained with periodicals, all the familiar droppings of the intellect, in the international sitting room of the mind. From an unseen corner came the sounds of gentlemen.

  Mira stirred unexpectedly. “All right, I will sing.” Her head rose, in the diva’s pause. “I will sing—Bhramss’ Lullaby.” She advanced for entry, and Mrs. Wigham and Miss Hulme moved politely aside. She bent her head. “It is not needful,” she said, almost jovial, and it seemed she was awkwardly attempting a joke. “It is not needful to wait for me because I am the star.” And, as mutely, they all turned to follow her in, there at last was the cab.

  Mira crossed to it without ceremony, leaving their farewells to Miss Moon. “Yes, perhaps so,” said Mrs. Wigham to Jane, who thought it wise to share the cab. “We must have our chat another time.” As the cab door closed, she leaned across Jane, to the others. “Cyril will be desolate not to have met you. And I have so enjoyed our afternoon.” And from her smile, wide as a salmon’s, as the cab drove off, it appeared that he would, that she had.

  They rode down through Trastevere in silence. A darkness invested the cab, as if they rode through the white, siesta-stricken streets on the black, plangent core of Mira’s impatience. As they crossed the Tiber she muttered, “I like to rest before a date!” and Miss Moon replied, “Well, you are resting. In the cab,” in that reasonable tone, half-toady, half-governess, which made Jane wonder at the exact terms of her standing by Mira in Rome. As they rounded the immense white sugar loaf of the Victor Emmanuel monument, Miss Moon remarked that they were not far from where the Roman wolf was kept in its cage. Because of Romulus and Remus—of course, they knew that story? Mira shook her head, intent on twisting her ring in time to the wheels. Miss Moon told the story of Romulus and Remus. “And so, ever since,” she concluded, “they keep a wolf, a female wolf, in a cage in the middle of Rome.”

  “What you mean a wolf!” Mira turned from the window. She stopped twisting the ring. That’s what gives her such a queer intentness, thought Jane. She only does one thing at a time.

  “What I said, dear. A real she-wolf, just like the one Romulus and Remus had. In a cage in the heart of Rome.”

  Mira grunted. “What hearts, these people! She does not give suck now, yes?”

  “Well, of course not!” said Miss Moon. “It’s just a symbol, dear. And they only keep one.”

  “Fine people!” said Mira. “What a thing!”

  “Mira has the dearest little girl at home,” said Miss Moon, as if to explain this tenderness on the part of one who had just kicked a cat. “The dearest little four-and-a-half-year-old girl. Just crazy for her mummy. Just pining for her mummy to come home.”

  Well, no six-o’clock cab will get her there, thought Jane. She rubbed the stone in her pocket with a secret, appeasing touch.

  Mira ignored this, bristling with some dark, libertarian sympathy that was as powerful as had been her impatience. “Crazy people!” she said. “What a thing!” When the cab drew up at the entrance of the Excelsior, she stood by unheeding while Miss Moon, over Jane’s protest and with the alertness of a lady in waiting, paid the very large fare. As they stood on the steps twilight fawned upon them, tangling their lashes with yellow, and from inside the hotel they heard, like a finger drawn across the backbone, the fine tinkle of evening pursuits. Mira blinked, breathing hard. “What a thing!” she said, deep in her throat, before she turned and went inside. “What a thing, to keep a wolf in a cage!”

  Left together on the steps of the gleaming entrance, Miss Moon and Jane each turned, hand held out, ready to make off. For there was nothing, each said to herself with an oblique inward glance, certainly nothing that they had in common.

  “Well—” said Miss Moon.

  “So pleased—” said Jane.

  But it was that perilously soft hour of all great cities in the spring, when the evening rises to a sound like the tearing of silk and it is better not to be alone, to have some plan.

  “Care to join me in a drink?” said Miss Moon.

  “Well—perhaps just one,” said Jane. I can’t refuse, she told herself. I must buy her a drink, because of that fare. After that it will be time for the eight o’clock sitting at the pensione. And after that I can sit on the balcony, on the pretty side, the Pincio side, and write letters home. Or I can ask that nice girl at the next table to have a granita di caffè at Doney’s. “Shall we go next door to the Flore?” she said. “Or if you’d like a walk—perhaps the Café Greco?” She was faintly proud of knowing both.

  “Oh, no, let’s go in here,” said Miss Moon. As they entered the Excelsior her face brightened. “All California’s here on spring location,” she said, sotto voce, as she led Jane to a table near the door of the huge lounge, and they sat down. “And this is the bar that gets the play.”

  At the bar itself there was only a solitary young man, his tall legs wrapped around the bar stool, his blond, “clean-cut American” good looks bent in moody profile over his glass, his tweed back turned away from the groups settled here and there in cushioned niches, as if he uncomfortably knew none of them. It was clear that these others all knew, or knew of, each other. Not that everyone talked to everyone else. But as new people entered conversations were arrested: foursomes spoke deeply among themselves but their glances were asymmetric, and as couples rose, scattering nods, and strode from the arena, a buzz formed behind them. And to the careful watcher, there was still another unity. The women—the wives, that is, for most left hands bore a shock of light—were not all young, but they were younger. The men were beautifully textured as puddings in their minimizing pin-stripe cases, and their cheeks were flanks freshly pummeled by the steam bath, but their wives were their daughters. Opposite them the women sat narrow in luminous sheaths, their shoulders soft explosions of fur, their faces unclenching and closing, automatic as fans.

  “Look! There’s Sylvia Fairchild!” Miss Moon spoke out of the side of her mouth. She raised her sharp chin with a brilliant smile that faded as it was doubtfully returned. Quickly she redistributed the smile to one far corner, waved briefly to another. She took a vengeful sip of her Martini. “Believe it or not—she used to do my nails at Marshall Field’s.” The Martini sank farther, and she leaned back with a sigh. “Pretty soon I’ll have to go upstairs and pound that typewriter. I simply have to lock myself in.”

  “Oh, you’re staying here?” said Jane.

  “Well, no, but I have a place to work in Mira’s suite. She gets in a dreadful state when there’s no—when she gets bored. And I like to be where the play is, you never know.” One of the chattering groups strolled by, and Miss Moon leaned brightly toward Jane, speaking very distinctly. “For instance, I was just going to do a book, when I meet Mat Zipp, of Decca. Why do a book, he says, there’s money in lyrics, and they’re shorter. So I do, and it turns out I’m a natural.” The group passed. She waved to the waiter for another drink. “So then,” she said in a lower tone, “so then what does he do but go and die on me, in a cab on the way to work. With my stuff in his briefcase, right there in the cab.”

  “Oh, my,” said Jane. In her childhood she had been much at the mercy of a little girl who was always wanting to play house. Now you just be old Mrs. Brown, Jane, and I’ll be Elise Harper, just married, and come to tea.

  “So I do a narrative, weave all the stuff together, and almost sell Dolin and Markova on the idea of a ballet.
” She took a sip of the second Martini. “Then they split up.”

  “Oh, dear,” said Jane. It struck her that she was still not a very good Mrs. Brown.

  Behind Miss Moon, at some distance, there was a mirror in which Jane could just see herself—rather unvarnished, tailored and small against all this princely down. Not quite plain Jane though, she told herself, and not quite yet, she thought, looking her age. At home, when she put on a bare-necked summer cotton and served gin-and-tonic to the sprightlier clique of the faculty, it was often hardly credited that she was the mother of those two enormous boys.

  “So then,” said Miss Moon heavily, “I’m at the Park Lane, and who do I bump into but Grofé. Get him for music and you’re set for the Festival Hall, everybody says. The English are suckers for Americana.”

  Behind her own image in the mirror, Jane saw the bent head of the young man. He bit his lip and recrossed his legs, still staring into his drink. Alone and out of place here, she thought, like me. It would be nice to talk to him, although the idea was, of course, absurd. That was the worst of being on one’s own too long in a strange country, so far from the base of affections that steadied one at home. One dried up without some personal emotion; that was all it was. One could not forever be a lens. And at certain hours of the day one found oneself lingering with anyone, as she lingered here.

  “Surely you know who Grofé is,” said Miss Moon.

  “Oh, yes, of course,” said Jane. “Philip Morris. I mean the commercial. And isn’t he Vladimir Dukelsky for classical—oh, no, of course not—that’s Vernon Duke.” She thinks me an idiot, she thought, and I am to sit on here, waiting to hear how it was they didn’t get Grofé. For from the grim, antiphonal way Miss Moon drew on her glass, it was clear that they hadn’t.

  “So then,” said Miss Moon, but she interrupted herself to twinkle a hand at someone who passed, to murmur an indistinct name.

  I’ll grab the check and go now, thought Jane. For it was no longer funny to watch Miss Moon. It was like seeing those women who hovered secretly at other women’s dressing tables, to spray themselves avidly and cheaply with another person’s scent.

  I’ll take the check and go now. She glanced at her watch. It was seven, that hour here when even the windows of pensione bedrooms were violet frames that turned one inside to say Look! to the empty room, to lie face downward, ears stopped against the bell-shake of evening, and say Listen! to the vacant bed. The hour when an experienced traveler knows better than to corner himself there. The hour when the lens turns upon oneself.

  “And … so then?” said Jane.

  But Miss Moon was looking elsewhere again, and this time with such a different, such an unrehearsed expression that Jane looked around too. It was Mira, standing at the entrance. Groomed now for people of importance, she had made herself, as women did, to be as like them as possible. Her dress was luminous too, cut with pale cleverness to conceal where it could no longer insist, and she stood encircled in a huge riband of fur. She looked sleeker and, in a powdery way, older. Perhaps she had seen this in some mirror before leaving, for now she reached up uncertainly and rumpled her tamed hair, as if to declare the girl she had been against the woman she was. She walked forward with a mannequin’s glide, her smile full for the room, then turned her back to it and, with an eager, a crescent leaning, slipped her hand through the arm of the young man at the bar.

  He looked up, then stood up, and on his face, handsomer even than in profile, one saw the snow marks of the goggles on the brown skin. But where the white circles on Mira’s face were fretted like rose windows, his were still smooth. He was about thirty, that age when, with Americans, one often glimpses the young man looking through the palings of the man, and in his look, lightened with relief but somehow hangdog, one caught this now. As he and Mira left the bar, Mira saw the two women, Jane and Miss Moon. For the first time she really saw them. She looked directly into their eyes and she smiled. Then she and the young man passed by them, walking slowly down the long room, and although Mira, nodding here and there with narrowed eyes, clung softly and proudly to the crook of his arm, it seemed almost that he was paraded on hers. A buzz formed behind them.

  “She’s a fool.” Miss Moon breathed this to herself. Behind her glasses her eyes were bright and fixed. “It’ll be all over the Coast in twenty-four hours.”

  Now the couple neared them again, in their return passage down the room. The young man’s face was warm. Mira was still faintly smiling, and although this time the smile, fixed on the door, was for neither of the two women, to Jane, trembling suddenly in her tailored suit with a shock that was bitter and sororal, it came as if it was. Almost a grimace, it showed its teeth to an invisible mirror, denying with the lips the secret lines that a body must gather—the crow’s feet of the armpit, the dented apple of the belly, the mapped crease, fine leather too long folded, that forms between the breasts. As Mira passed her on the arm of the young man, her scent remained for a moment behind. It rested on Jane as if it were her own.

  At the door, Mira and the young man paused. A rush of lilac came to them from the outside, and Mira’s fur slid from shoulder to waist, a dropped calyx. The young man replaced it carefully. Her lips parted, watching him. It was a beautiful fur, manipulable as smoke. Before the arts of the furrier had dappled it, it might have been just the color of wolf.

  Left together by the flicking of the door, the two women stared at one another.

  “Traveling alone?” said Miss Moon.

  Jane nodded.

  “Divorced too?”

  “No,” said Jane. “I’m a widow.” Her head lifted. “I have two boys.”

  Miss Moon seemed not to have heard this last. “Care to—join forces for dinner?”

  No, thought Jane. Don’t settle for anybody’s company. As she does. As she has. Not yet. She gazed past Miss Moon, saw herself in the mirror, and looked quickly away. “Thanks,” she said, and her voice was kind. “I’m afraid … I have work to do too.”

  “Oh, you work,” said Miss Moon eagerly. “What do you do?”

  “I teach,” said Jane. “In a university.” I teach, an echo said inside her, and of course at home I have the two boys. And suddenly the echo, her breath, something, rammed itself hard against her chest, inside. Not enough, it said, beating behind the mapped crease between her breasts. Not enough. What a thing, it said, crying. What a thing!

  “Well, back to the salt mines for us, eh?” said Miss Moon. Her voice was matey, unbearable. Just as if she too had smelled the scent, had heard the thing crying. As if she knew too that Jane, staring into the big, winged glasses, could see the two poor eyes beating against the glass.

  And now they stood up quickly, gathered their purses and signaled for the waiter. When he came, they paid him with a dispatch unusual to women, and the lire notes left lying in his saucer were large enough for anybody here. For now they could not part quickly enough. For now, each said to herself, the other’s company was no longer to be borne. No, it was not to be borne. Not now. Now that they both knew what it was they had in common.

  Songs My Mother Taught Me

  SOME TEN YEARS AGO when I was for the first time in London—when, as a rather elderly innocent abroad, I was for the first time anywhere outside New York City except Rochester, Elmira, Binghamton, the Eastern Shore, a few summer resorts in New England and, at the age of twelve, Asbury Park, New Jersey—I attended a semi-diplomatic dinner party at which, after we had all drunk considerable amounts of several delightful wines, one of the ladies present suddenly peeled off her blouse.

  Since the other guests, though moist and perfervid, were still upright in their chairs and conversation, the incident caused, even in that imperturbable company, a certain silence. Chitchat, suddenly quenched, faded off into one of those pauses where isolated sentences stand out sharply. The man on my left, whom I had placed tentatively as either a connoisseur of heraldry or a baiter of Americans, had been lecturing me on the purity of lineage maintained by German nob
ility up to the last war. “Where else,” he had just inquired, “can one find, even now, a person whose line shows sixteen quarterings?” Then he stopped short, as if contradicted by circumstance. Headily I reassured myself that quite without knowing it—and in the first week too—I must have scaled one of those dizzily international heights of society so often promised the provincial: a set so patrician that queens had no legs, emperors might be clothed exactly as they said they were, and ladies appeared in their quarterings without shame.

  She was an exceedingly pretty young woman of about twenty-five with masses of blond hair arranged ingénue, and a pair of truly enormous blue eyes swimming in some Venus-lymph, clear natural nacre in which a man, or indeed any onlooker, might well sink. Words like “truly” came inevitably to mind as one regarded them. As I did so, they spilled over pellucidly. Casting a reproachful look at her partner (later it was understood that he had dared her), turning down the corners of a lovely mouth rosied with wine and—though one hated to think it—stupidity, she gazed at us, clutching the discarded portion of her costume, then hung her head and let fall on her lavishly ruffled broderie anglaise corselet two neatly schooled tears.

  “Why, Lady Catherine!” our host said at once, and rising, he went round the table to her and poured her more wine, murmuring what I thought to be “How very sporting!” and capping it with—as he raised his own glass—“Bravo!”

  Other gentlemen took up the plaudit. Lady Catherine, shyly consoled, raised her head, and I remembered her patronymic, ducally familiar even to me: one of her ancestresses, whom she was said to resemble, had been a wife of Henry the Eighth. From her round eyes two more pearls dropped, but this time surely with retrospective art—I wondered whether Henry, watching her ancestress’ head fall, might not have thought to himself, “None of my other wives looked that good upside down.”